


Dead Sea Devotee

by Klavier



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gods & Goddesses, Hurricanes & Typhoons, M/M, Not Really Character Death, Summer Blues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-25
Updated: 2020-08-25
Packaged: 2021-03-05 03:07:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25247362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Klavier/pseuds/Klavier
Summary: Kyungsoo sets a mug of tea on the floor beside his elbow. He has an indulgent look on his face, fond, exasperated, the look he reserves for Baekhyun and the dandelions growing stubbornly through cracks in his porch.“Compasses sometimes hold the dearest memories for sailors. That’s why we get them so often—no one wants to carry that weight onwards.” Kyungsoo removes one from the fallen stack and runs his fingers over the glass eye.
Relationships: Byun Baekhyun/Do Kyungsoo | D.O
Comments: 10
Kudos: 47
Collections: Round 4: Spring and Summer





	Dead Sea Devotee

**Author's Note:**

> Written for prompt #12 at EXO Seasonal Fest. I wanted to challenge myself to write something short and with sparse dialogue. The result is messy and strange but I'm relatively happy with it! Thank you to the mods for being patient with my technology woes and for putting on such a fun fest, and thank you prompter for this excellent idea. Hope you enjoy. :)

_ “I found me in a great surging space, _

_ At either end a door, _

_ And I said: "What is this giddying place, _

_ With no firm-fixéd floor, _

_ That I knew not of before?"  _

  
—The Masked Face, Thomas Hardy

  
  


There is a house at the end of the world and in it lives a man with no home.

  
  


When the sea is rough, Baekhyun is delighted. Foaming, frothing waves. Dark peals of thunder. Storms emerge from the ocean and gather around his ship, gripping the wood tight, grasping sailors with the wet hand of a god. The thrill excites him. He knows himself to be a daredevil, because this—rope burn and salt in his eyes—this is home.

Baekhyun loves the sea and the sea loves him back, like the quake loves the fault line.

He laughs in the face of this storm. The sailors hush him, muzzle him, superstitious to the core.  _ Show disrespect, and the sea will punish you _ , they say. But Baekhyun is the superstition.

When he jumps overboard, when the water whips his ankles and he hits the deck too hard, when the sun winks goodbye before the storm which will slurp away his life, Baekhyun knows what’s coming. All his flirtation has been leading to this.

To die at home is not to die.

To die in the sea is to wake up in the house at the end of the world. A man looms over him, eyes large, mouth unhappy, hair short and tousled. He’s handsome. Angelic in the most unbearable of ways.

“Did I make it?” Baekhyun’s throat is a salt mine. “Are you real?”

“You stupid boy,” is what the man says.

Baekhyun looks around and this is what he sees: A small house with a tin roof and glass windows on every wall. Outside is the ocean, palm trees, marine fog. A shipwreck in the shallows that looks nothing like his own. On the shelves are a hundred thousand compasses, all stacked neatly like plates, all pointing different directions.

“I’ve come to help you.” Baekhyun sits up. A cough wracks his chest and the man hands him a mug of tea. He asks, “Water?”

“There is no water here.” The man steps back and looks out the window. “My name is Kyungsoo. You shouldn’t have come.”

  
  
  


Kyungsoo explains that he’s lived here for as long as he can remember. Since the first rainfall, the first kiss of wave against sand, the first breath taken by the moon. He knows every inch of this beach at the end of the world. 

And it is a peculiar place. The days last minutes while the nights last hours. Summer is forever and winter is only a nightmarish memory. The shipwreck must be home to sea-wolves or ghosts or sirens, because when the moon is high, howls echo over the waves. Endless and yearning. 

Baekhyun is not allowed to swim out to the shipwreck and investigate. He is not allowed to touch the ocean, actually, not even with his shoes on and his pants rolled down. Not even with his shirt wrapped around both hands like gloves. He tries to get close, sidle up with doe eyes, but he’s pushed back by a supernatural refusal. 

Weeks pass and he settles into a new routine of living with Kyungsoo and his lighthouse eyes, Kyungsoo and his deep silences. Baekhyun mostly helps around the house. He has a knack for clearing spiders from the eaves and setting them free in the scraggly bushes beyond the eastern window.

And every day Baekhyun tries again to dip his toes in the water.

The closest he gets is throwing shells back into the depths when they’re littered too far up the sand. So he kicks rocks and yells at the water and throws a tantrum.

It breaks his heart. He wants the sea. 

“Should’ve thought about that before you got yourself stuck here,” Kyungsoo says. He has little sympathy for Baekhyun, sees him as young and foolishly idealistic.

_ But I came here for you _ , Baekhyun wants to say.  _ I knew someone was here, tending the edge. I wanted to help. _

The truth is, Kyungsoo does not need company. He isn’t lonely. Kyungsoo is not forbidden from the sea; he goes out often in a dinghy, a tiny and unreliable shred of wood which is closer to a death wish than a raft.

He must meet people out there, because he always comes back holding lace hair bonnets, copper watches, leather shoes, miscellaneous jewelry. Compasses. So many compasses. The trinkets he throws back into the sea, but the compasses he keeps in their little house as some dark reminder of his duty.

Baekhyun rearranges the compasses to pass time. “Why don’t you keep the jewelry?” He lays flat on the floorboards and stacks as many compasses on his stomach as he can. Six, seven—they collapse. “I want to play dress up. It’s boring here.”

This was his choice, but he didn’t know what he would be giving up. A life, yes. But the sea? Unacceptable. 

Kyungsoo sets a mug of tea on the floor beside his elbow. He has an indulgent look on his face, fond, exasperated, the look he reserves for Baekhyun and the dandelions growing stubbornly through cracks in his porch. 

“Compasses sometimes hold the dearest memories for sailors. That’s why we get them so often—no one wants to carry that weight onwards.” Kyungsoo removes one from the fallen stack and runs his fingers over the glass eye. 

It is the first time he says  _ we _ . He has beautiful fingers. Slender, long despite his frame, with bulky knuckles that Baekhyun wants near his mouth. Sometimes to die is to fall in love. Baekhyun came searching for the man who lives in the house at the end of the world, and this is what he found:

Kyungsoo is not a patient man, but he’s kind. He teaches Baekhyun to knock coconuts out of trees and avoid their crashing downfall. He teaches him how to make sweet-and-sour soup above their electric stove, the electricity’s origin a mystery, and how to wash clothes in a metal basin of honey tea. There’s no water here. No water but sea and tea. 

“Where do you get the honey?” Baekhyun asks one day while he’s sunbathing on the front steps. 

“The beehive. Obviously.”

Baekhyun sits up and shades his eyes. “Show me.” 

Kyungsoo looks most beautiful when the sun is setting. Peach light turns his skin to gold, his lips to rose glass. He looks like the marble statue of the fountain in Baekhyun’s sleepy port town, where he grew up splashing in tepid water and craning on his tip-toes to kiss the handsome rock face.

He takes Baekhyun a short distance through the palm trees. They don’t leave the beach—they never leave the beach—because there’s a sense of Blank behind the palms. Not an absence but a lacking, like that space is questionable as a space. It simply isn’t. So he doesn’t go there and doesn’t ask.

The beehive is a pyramid of neon blue light slouching on the sand.

“I’ve been at sea so long,” Baekhyun says. “I forgot what a beehive looked like.”

“When did you first go to sea?”

“I don’t remember.”

Kyungsoo is paying no attention to the bees, though they flock to him in pairs and zip around his bare feet. He’s watching Baekhyun watch the ocean. Baekhyun is always watching the ocean, or Kyungsoo, because frankly nothing else matters. The two objects of his devotion in one line of sight. That's comfort.  


But this is the first time Kyungsoo watches him back.

  
  
  


“Before you, I was alone for so long that I stopped feeling lonely,” Kyungsoo whispers as they’re sitting on the beach, trading slices of mango, getting secrets stuck in their teeth.

It sounds like an accusation.

Baekhyun doesn’t understand what he means at first. A tropical breeze stirs his hair, he hears the whimper of a mosquito slapped away from an exposed vein. Before, Kyungsoo was alone. Now he isn’t. He shouldn’t be lonely now that Baekhyun is here. He went from having no one to having someone—on his beach, in his house, in his bed, under his skin. 

But after an eternity of quiet, it must be an unsettling change. 

Maybe he forgot how to need. Baekhyun can’t really empathize. He’s always needed something: freedom, saltwater, a sharper dagger. Someone to break him down and make him feel needed back. 

“Do you wish I hadn’t come?” Baekhyun passes him a sticky seed. Kyungsoo throws it in the waves and it skips once, twice, thrice.

Kyungsoo pauses. His thighs, thick and slathered with discarded pulp, tense as he leans closer. They’re face-to-face, separated by trembling inches. He wipes a drop of juice from Baekhyun’s chin. 

Baekhyun’s body is a wire pulled tight. There’s an ache in his stomach. Maybe from the mangoes, maybe not.

“Sometimes, yes.” Kyungsoo takes another wet bite. 

  
  
  


When the sun is too hot to breathe under, Baekhyun fills his arms with compasses. Cracked glass, rusted iron, oxidized copper, in a myriad of creative shapes. All the funny-looking compasses he can spot along the shelves. 

He’s bored and Kyungsoo isn’t around. Kyungsoo does that sometimes—disappears on the boat or along the sand. Somewhere Baekhyun tries to follow but never can. Like chasing bilge cats around barrels of gunpowder and getting close enough to touch their tails before they suddenly vanish.

So Baekhyun is searching for entertainment. He lines up the compasses on the sand, each a step apart, and uses them to write an enormous SOS message.

Traditionally a marooned sailor would set fires to get the attention of passing ships. Baekhyun has neither flint nor hope. A ship hasn’t passed by in the weeks—months—years he’s been here. He doesn’t want to leave, anyway. He can imagine no better way to pass the time. This is just an act of idleness, something to keep his hands busy.

When he smashes the last compass into the hot sand, he steps back to admire his handiwork. Unsteady but true. Baekhyun kicks a tiny, errant crab away from the curling letter S. By virtue of his literacy, he was considered one of the smartest men on his ship. Here he is squandering those talents in a strange land with a strange love.

If he can call this love. Is there a difference between love and devotion?

Kyungsoo comes walking across the sand barefoot. He’s shirtless now. His white pants drag through the water. “You can always leave if you choose.”

Though Baekhyun has no desire to do so, he draws circles in the sand with a stick and plays along. “How?”

“Same way you got here.”

Baekhyun frowns. “I can’t drown with no water.”

Kyungsoo is studying the compasses. He bends over to wiggle one free of sand. It’s black as obsidian. Black as the sky on the night Baekhyun fell overboard. Or dove, depending on your perspective of faith. Kyungsoo brings the compass to his lips. 

“Sure you can,” he says.

Because Baekhyun is still feeling restless, he kicks sand at Kyungsoo. It sprays across white pants. He is chased furiously down the beach. The afternoon becomes an obstacle course of palm trees and fallen coconuts ripe for tripping, and through it Baekhyun laughs.

  
  
  


A typhoon arrives. Against all common sense, Kyungsoo still goes out on the water.

Baekhyun fights this viciously. He loses. Voice hoarse from screaming, from pleading, he returns to the house in furious stomps. He has no right to make demands of Kyungsoo but he does anyway. Don’t leave, it’s dangerous. Stay with me. I hate being alone here.

Why must you do this, Baekhyun wants to ask. But he knows better than most how unkind water can be. He can imagine the cupped and glittering souls who need directing through the waves, lost and at their most vulnerable. He can't fault Kyungsoo for being the lighthouse.  


The pillow on their tiny cot is pushed into his face so that he can scream harder. Maybe something else on this godforsaken beach will hear him, wake up, and devour their immortal bodies.

(But Kyungsoo’s first, for his insolence.)

Rain thrashes against the tin roof. Alone, Baekhyun becomes the superstitious one. For hours he hunches over a beeswax candle, reciting the names of every deity he knows. Begging.

At dawn the sky brightens enough for Baekhyun to watch the gray destruction of his beach. The palm tree closest to the window is hanging on with half its roots gutted, the wind plucking off enormous leaves one by one. Debris smothers the sand.

He huddles on the bed, exhausted and wrung out. Baekhyun is asleep when the riot recedes. He wakes when the door creaks open and Kyungsoo returns.

“Are you okay?” The words are out of his mouth before he’s fully awake, half-propped up on one shoulder.

Baekhyun can’t see through the dim shadows. There’s a rustling noise, a few footsteps, then silence. He feels a presence beside the bed, warm and waiting.

In confusion he sits up properly. “Kyungsoo.” 

Something cold and wet touches his cheek and Baekhyun flinches back. Instinct sets his bones vibrating. He presses himself against the windowsill, processing a series of images so fast he can’t breathe around them: gray sky, jutting bedframe, circle of ash on the floor, and the man standing inches from him who looks like Kyungsoo but  _ isn’t _ .

Baekhyun draws a breath to scream.

“You prayed for me,” says the man, and it must’ve been a trick of the light because he is Kyungsoo again, like he always was. Kyungsoo’s hands are freezing when they cup Baekhyun’s cheeks. “You prayed to me.”

Those are two very different statements. Both are probably true. Baekhyun shivers and nods, afraid to dislodge the palms from his face but afraid of their proximity, too. His body can’t decide whether to lean forward or away. Two methods of self-preservation.

Baekhyun covers Kyungsoo’s hands with his own, clutching tight and warming his corpse-like skin. “Is it over?”

He means the storm, but when Kyungsoo says yes, the word has a thousand meanings. A world in one statement: Yes, it’s over. Yes, we’re still here. Yes, I came back to you.

Kyungsoo climbs onto the cot and covers Baekhyun with his trembling, frozen body. His clothes are dry but burn like ice against Baekhyun’s sleepy skin. He makes a noise of pain and surprise that Kyungsoo swallows with his hand.

His entire palm covers Baekhyun’s mouth. “Shhh,” Kyungsoo whispers. His lips are magnetized to the tender skin of Baekhyun’s temple. Their legs, tangled together and both shivering. Kindling a union like two chains braided into one anchor. Even if he wanted to, he couldn’t break free.

Baekhyun’s body jolts again before accepting the cold skin-to-skin contact suckling away his warmth, surrendering gratefully to a purgatory between the sheets. He falls back to sleep. He dreams of watching sunlight splinter on the surface of water.

  
  
  


Baekhyun is scraping sand from between his toes when Kyungsoo touches his shoulder.

Those hands. Those graceful fingers, that commanding wrist. He takes one look and loses himself, knows suddenly why he is needed here. He stands and his whole body trembles. After so much time on land he’s afraid he’s lost his sealegs. 

Kyungsoo uses those hands to guide Baekhyun backward by the waist, through shadows sharpened by candles on the windowsill, until his back hits the door and the whole house shakes.

Kyungsoo kisses him. Pulls back to press a palm to his chest, checks if he’s still breathing. Kisses him again. His hands are like cuffs around Baekhyun’s waist, digging and squeezing in ways that should be painful but feel like an inquisition. Let me touch. Let me seek.

And Baekhyun doesn’t fight. His body folds like the stem of a wavering flower, spine flat against the door. All he can do is part his lips and take the hot pressure of Kyungsoo’s mouth, the demands, the sweet rhythm.

His hands end up in Kyungsoo’s hair, uncertain if they’re trying to reel him closer or pull him away, but tangled either way. They flex, tug. Kyungsoo responds by breaking the kiss and pressing suction-kisses against Baekhyun’s neck. Here, under his jaw. Here, on his collarbone. Here, over the vulnerable column of his throat.

It should be  _ too sudden  _ and  _ too much  _ but on the contrary, Baekhyun experiences total clarity for the first time since he arrived on this spit of land. He came here to serve the sea. This is how he should do so.

So Baekhyun does push Kyungsoo back. Not far, just enough to feel tickles of Kyungsoo’s breath against his cheek. Enough to make desperate eye contact, which he deliberately holds while sliding to his knees. Cold wood is a shock against the skin of his legs.

Kyungsoo touches his face reverently, a thumb against his lips. Lets his eyes fall to half-mast. Makes a home in Baekhyun’s mouth.

  
  
  


Only once does Kyungsoo return from his dinghy with anything noteworthy.

He hurries into the house, disrupting Baekhyun making stew. In his hands is a baby parakeet. Feathers like sunflowers, a beak like the sharp claws of sea monsters in storybooks. She is a fragile and beautiful creature. She is a promise.

She takes one look at Baekhyun and wobbles toward him on stick legs, cooing and crooning.

“Can we keep her?” Baekhyun cups both hands around her body. 

Memories of his last past life are fading. Baekhyun doesn’t recall the people he once loved, but this bird strikes a familiar chord. Like he has seen her face before. She is lost and overjoyed and lonely all at once. Maybe Baekhyun sees himself.

When he shifts his weight to lift her with one hand, skin pulls across his collarbone. There, a sting of fading bruises. A reminder. Like the tender spot across the mole on his inner thigh. A hundred handprints staking claim, only visible in memory but pink-hot when he looks at Kyungsoo. 

Baekhyun momentarily forgets the bird. He must drag his eyes away from the curve of Kyungsoo’s shoulder. Last night he left teeth marks there.

The bird is warm. Alive. 

“Yes,” Kyungsoo says. “She’s yours.”

He looks softer now. A companion has turned Kyungsoo tender, smoothed out his rough and otherworldly edges. When he smiles there is a sunbeam on his face that doesn’t strike back. 

As if the stone has melted into skin, the ice into water. Baekhyun reaches out and tangles his fingers with Kyungsoo’s. Calluses against his palms are familiar now. Their warmth, one and the same.

Baekhyun leans forward and kisses him, kisses him, kisses him. 

  
  
  


In this house at the end of the world lives a man and his lover, the sea.


End file.
